It’s always an honour to stand in this House and today to talk about standing order changes that the government has proposed.

Before I start talking about the individual changes, I’m just going to back up and talk about what Parliament is and what the standing orders are from our perspective and from my perspective.

One of the great things about this Parliament is that everyone—and I’m a good example of this: Anyone can be a parliamentarian. You don’t need years of university poli sci. You don’t need to be a lawyer. You don’t need—right? I’m a farmer. I’m proud of it. That is the great thing about Parliament, that all voices can be heard.

It’s not a perfect system, and we are all working so that even more voices can be heard. We did something yesterday and I’ll talk about that later, but it’s really important to remember that.

The standing orders are basically the rule book. They are the rules on how Parliament works. I’m not a history major either, so I’m not going to go through when each change was made, but that’s basically what the standing orders are. They’re the rules. They’re how we engage each other, the parameters of how the government makes legislation and how we, as the official opposition, point out either where we think the legislation isn’t adequate or, if there’s legislation we agree with, where we’ll vote with the government. But it’s really important that there are rules. On occasion, the rules are changed. The rules weren’t changed very often in the past. I believe that this government certainly holds the record for changing the rules. I agree with the government House leader that it is a living, breathing document—but it’s not a quarterly. If something bothers me today, on the government side—“Oh, we’re not going to let that happen again.” And there have been occasions where, in our opinion, that has been the case—not all.

This morning, I listened very intently to the government House leader. I disagree with him vehemently on many occasions, but I enjoy working with him, actually, and I respect him. We don’t always agree. He sometimes makes me very angry, makes us very angry, but I respect him. Some of the changes that the government has proposed—and the government House leader, in his speech this morning, listed many of them off, and his perspective on why they were changed, how they were changed and how it improved debate in this Legislature, or, basically, how it improved how laws are made in the province of Ontario. And on some points, we agree.

In one of the standing order changes, the government changed—after a debate of a bill, you would debate for an hour or 20 minutes or 10 minutes, and there was a period that used to be called “questions and comments”; it was basically four little speeches of two minutes, and then the original debater got to put in his extra two minutes. The government changed that to questions and answers—so a minute a question. We think it was a beneficial change for everyone. It holds everyone more accountable for their remarks, because if you’re paying attention—I love this place, and I pay attention to almost everything that’s said here, except that last petition. When you pay attention to a speech, you look for places where either you want more information or you want to challenge the speaker, you want to challenge their position, because that’s what debate is about. When the government added questions, it also put more pressure on the opposition. When the opposition criticizes the government on whatever issue of the day, the government members get a chance to question the opposition members who just made that speech, so the opposition is more accountable for what is said. I think that was a great change done by this government, done by the current House leader.

Another change they did is to members’ statements right before question period, and the government House leader said the reason they did that is because members’ statements—a member’s statement is a minute and 30 seconds. A percentage of members get to do a member’s statement every day—I believe it’s nine members who aren’t ministers. You get a minute and 30 seconds to talk about whatever you want—usually, it’s something great that’s happening in your riding or something bad that’s happening in your riding, or someone in your riding who has had a momentous event; sometimes they’re a tribute to someone who has passed. They’re very important. They used to be at 1 o’clock—sometimes 1 o’clock or sometimes 3 o’clock—in the afternoon. The House leader changed it, or the government changed it, to right before question period, so 10:15, because there are a lot more people in the House at question period and a lot more attention. That’s one way of looking at it. I’m not disputing that that is a relevant point, but in actuality, the way it works, for many members’ statements it’s worse, because question period starts at 10:30. If your member’s statement is at 10:15, for the first three or four members’ statements often there’s nobody paying attention. You can’t even hear the people talk because everyone’s filing in for question period. It’s incredibly distracting. It sounds good on paper, but people aren’t actually sitting for question period, they’re all filing in.

Was that done in bad faith? I don’t believe so. But it is a case of it not really working out as well as portrayed. Sometimes it does. Some speakers are more commanding than other speakers, so if you have the last member’s statement and you’re a really forceful speaker, sometimes you can quiet the crowd down. But a lot of people are almost—and I don’t mean this in a non-parliamentary way, but they’re almost cheated out of their member’s statement, and not on purpose. Whereas if it’s 1 o’clock in the afternoon and there aren’t a lot of people in the House, you can project easier, right? It’s not as good a change, sometimes, as how it’s portrayed.

Another change the government House leader mentioned that isn’t, in our humble opinion, as beneficial as you might think: It used to be that we could ask a minister a question, direct it to the minister, or direct it to the Premier and the Premier would have to direct it to the appropriate minister. They changed that, so now the House leader can put it wherever he wants in a cabinet. But we used to be able to direct a question to a minister and the minister would have to respond. So, as a result, you get a lot more questions to the Premier, because we can’t decide where it goes anyway.

Before, if I wanted to ask a question to the Minister of Agriculture and I knew it was going to—I don’t ask a lot of questions to the Minister of Agriculture. But occasionally, and I’m just using myself as an example, I ask a tough question and I want it to go to a certain minister, but the way the standing orders have been changed, there’s no guarantee of that. Is that really—from the overall of making us all more accountable, is that an improvement? I don’t think so. So there’s always two ways of looking at things.

One thing I would like to—I don’t know how I’m going to put this. I’m just going to backtrack for a second. Yesterday, we made a change to the standing orders. Yesterday was a historic, historic occasion because, up until yesterday, the only languages that could be spoken here were French or English. Yesterday, we made a change that, for people of Indigenous origin, First Nations, if they’re elected, they can identify what their language is and it can be spoken here in the Legislature. That is incredible. It’s a lot more complicated than it sounds too, because it will be translated simultaneously in the Legislature. It will be written in their language. It was an incredible change, and I commend—I give credit where credit is due: I commend the member from Kiiwetinoong. His first language is Oji-Cree, and he started the ball rolling. But I also really do try to give credit where credit is due. I credit the government House leader. He saw the need, and we worked together, along with the Minister of Indigenous Affairs, to make that happen. We consulted beforehand. We looked to make sure that the standing order change would work. We did that all beforehand, because we all realized the importance of it. And to the government House leader’s credit, we did it separately from the standing orders today, because there might be things we disagree with on with the government in this, but there certainly was no disagreement; it was unanimous yesterday. It was amazing.

The only thing that will be more amazing is the first time when Sol Mamakwa, the member from Kiiwetinoong, can stand in this place and ask a question or make a speech in Oji-Cree. That is the only thing that will eclipse what happened yesterday, and I give credit to the government House leader, the Minister of Northern Development and Indigenous Affairs, mostly to the member of Kiiwetinoong. We didn’t do it only for the member of Kiiwetinoong but for the First Nations people, who need to be represented here for generations to come.

So I give credit where credit is due. That is the way it should be done, but it isn’t always the way it’s done, and sometimes standing orders are brought forward, changes are brought forward that don’t always benefit the democratic process as much as the government claims—not always.

For those of who you were just here and just heard a petition of, I believe, 15 minutes—well, there’s 15 minutes on the clock, our first petition was a minute, and it went well past the clock. That is the case. In his speech, the government House leader identified a problem, that there was a loophole where people could abuse the petition process and read long petitions to limit other members from using the time for petitions, and then one of the government’s own members, for three days, I believe, did exactly that, to create the problem that the government House leader had identified.

The person who has done the most petitions in the House since I’ve been here: the member from Nickel Belt. We call her the petition queen. Her average petition? Under 60 seconds. The vast majority of people who do petitions here are respectful and respect other people’s time. When there’s 15 minutes, there’s often times when we run out of time for petitions. We get it; some petitions take a bit longer. A few petitions sound like War and Peace. That one sounded like the whole series. And the Speaker has the discretion to advise, if you have a really long petition or if it’s been read before, to summarize it. I’ve been here for 13 years and change, 12 years? Anyway, quite a long time, and very rarely does the process get abused. Now we’re going to change the petition process so petitions themselves can no longer be read in the Legislature. They can be summarized. It doesn’t really lay out how long the summary is going to be or how short, but they can be summarized—must be, not can be. They must be summarized. So the two petitions that we heard today, the reasonably short one from the member from Waterloo—

I’m pleased to stand in this House and add what I hope are some thoughtful comments to this debate about the standing orders. For the folks playing along at home, the standing orders are the rules of this space and place. They’re the rules of the game. As we heard the government House leader this morning talk about, the fact that they have been mostly unchanged for a very long time—that this government, this government House leader made a lot of changes in a short period of time, as he put it, to modernize or whatnot, maybe to make it in the image of the government in this space; sometimes to frustrate the opposition.

But here we stand with a series of changes. Some of them are kind of housekeeping and not super relevant, and others are more consequential. I would say that some of them are highly problematic, and others, I’m not exactly what they will mean for this place, but we’ll talk a little bit about that.

The standing orders feel a little bit dry if people are tuning in to debate. It’s not an issue like health care, it isn’t something going on in our communities, but it is how we conduct ourselves in this room. It’s the rules that we play by. How many minutes for this, or how we’re allowed to table a bill, and all of that kind of stuff.

But it does still matter to the outside world in a few different aspects. One of them I’m going to talk about because this is in the sights of the government today. The government is making changes to petitions and how we’re allowed to share petitions in this space. I fundamentally have a problem with this, and I’ll tell you why.

There are only a handful of ways that the public can have their voice heard in this room—their actual voice. We represent their issues, we tell stories, and Lord knows I get lots of letters and I do well to share those letters in this space. But people come to committee and they present, and another way that they have their voices and their issues raised in this space is through petitions.

Petitions have a format. The government is taking away that we don’t have to get them certified. Okay, fine, whatever, but we still want them to be in order in the House. And it is a petition to the Legislative Assembly of Ontario—not to the government, but to the whole Legislative Assembly of Ontario. That’s how it starts. It is to all of us, because regardless of what colour tie you have or what your politics are, we’re all represented to serve the members of our community.

In fact, when a member from your community comes to you and says, “I have a petition I want you to take to the Legislature,” sometimes, individually, we don’t love that petition. I’m sure the government members don’t love a lot of them, because they can be quite critical, or they raise ideas for solutions that may or may not be what the government wants to do or is planning to do.

And sometimes, they come to me as an opposition member and maybe, ideologically, I don’t love it, but we still are obligated and have the responsibility to bring them to this place and table it so that it gets before the government. Some of them, we do agree with as members, and we get up in this room and we read it into the Legislature.

And in that moment, the people who have written a petition in their words—“Whereas this is a problem,” and “Whereas this is happening,” and “Whereas this is a challenge that we’re seeing in our agency, in our community, in our family,” and “Whereas all these things are true, this is what we’re asking for.”

Speaker, to not be allowed to share the reasons for a petition, to not be allowed to share the “whereas-es,” as they’re called, but the rationale for the ask in this room, on the record, is really problematic.

I will admit, I have sat here, and I’ve listened to petitions that I know make the government members squirm. I remember the minister—hold on. The minister that just spoke: the Minister of Economic Development, Job Creation and Trade, the member from Nipissing. I know that he was here as an opposition member for a while, and I’m willing to bet, if I checked Hansard, that there would be petitions that that member read petitioning the then government on specific issues.

It’s interesting, because there are government members in here, and some of them were in this space, kind of standing in this area. I see another member in the under-press who probably remembers taking up space on this side. There are those who served in opposition and are now government and know darn well that those petitions can come from their communities and that they matter to individuals. Then there’s a whole whack of shiny new government members who have never had the pleasure of serving in opposition—and I look forward for you to when you get to, by the way.

But I think, fundamentally, that saying we cannot share the voices of our communities is a problem. The member from Nickel Belt, who reads petitions all the time, collects them from her community, is amazing about that—even she was saying, “Fine, go ahead and shorten it, but don’t make me have to change the words of real people.”

Now, there’s a member who has been here three days and reading a petition that looks like a Santa list. As he read it, he said, “I want to thank Sally in my office for the work on this.” We’re not supposed to have our staff or ourselves write those petitions. It happens that we help people, we guide them. We might offer thoughtful suggestions. Let’s be real, there are issues that we all want to bring up in this House. But to take up that kind of time and block people from participating—if I’m only allowed to summarize petitions, then careful what you wish for, because I may get up and say, “Here’s a petition brought forward by this group and it’s called this,” and my summary may be, “And they think that what you’re doing is garbage and problematic and harmful.” That may be what you get because it didn’t explicitly say that I can’t.

My point is that silencing people in the province of Ontario is wrong.

Interjection: It’s kind of undemocratic.